Bummer to see an awesome film go away

Luckless wrote in post #17114595
Film isn't 'the past', but the days when it was highly popular and profitable enough to justify a huge range of options isn't here any longer. Costs will most likely continue to rise as shooting film remains as a bit of an unusual process practiced by a small handful compared to modern digital work.

As such, if there are three competing products which fill similar roles, then we can expect the least popular one to always be at the risk of getting canned. This is one of the reasons why I'm highly interested in doing my own chemistry entirely for film/plate work. If I'm the source of the actual product which I make from supplies readily available and used in other industries, then it is far less likely that I'll ever find myself unable to get my favourite product. It might mean switching suppliers, but silver or platinum of a set purity isn't going to be that different whether I buy it from supplier A, or supplier B.

In the gallery world silver gelatin and platinum prints get 10X more than inkjet. I think as long as there are photographers out there shooting film there will be a supply coming from somewhere.

airfrogusmc wrote in post #17121738
In the gallery world silver gelatin and platinum prints get 10X more than inkjet. I think as long as there are photographers out there shooting film there will be a supply coming from somewhere.

Oh there will be a supply from somewhere. The question is what kind of options stay available and what kind of prices they ask for. Price of silver isn't going down after all.

Like anything the more rare it becomes the more valuable it becomes.

And there are still profit margins to consider. Just how thin can those get before companies producing film and related supplies/materials decide that their capital is better spent on new ventures rather than maintaining or upgrading factory space and equipment? Someone in upper management at Kodak might pull out some charts and spreadsheets showing that the company can turn a vastly higher profit over the next six quarters if they halt all production next week, sell the equipment for scrap to get it out of the buildings as quickly as possible, and retool all their properties to produce little anti-static trays used to hold semi-conductors.

The people calling the shots aren't in business to make film, but rather to make money.

The film industry is riding a very awkward path forward. If prices rise or ease of availability falls too much then there will be fewer people who are willing to put up with the effort of dealing with film. There will always be a segment who works to produce photo-chemical prints as an end product, but they're not actually depended on the film industry. (There has been some really awesome work done in platinum prints using modulated laser based printers. Combine that with the lowering cost and improvements in digital sensors, and the lowering costs and greater understanding of the equipment involved, and suddenly film no longer becomes all that important to the field. There is hardly any mainstream research being done on expanding the dynamic range of film stock, but every half decent university with a graduate level physics or electrical engineering program probably add at least half a dozen new young minds tackling the problem every year for digital sensors.)


Fewer people using film will mean lower sales, which in turn shrinks margins, and brings us that much closer to the point where a company says 'No' when faced with the question of if it is worth the cost of operation to turn that master switch on the machines to do another run of someone's favourite line/ISO of film.


You can still find actual skilled blacksmiths in the world, and I'm talking about craftsmen who go well beyond banging on some cheap low carbon steel in their garage to make candle holders that look 'rustic', but how many do you know?


Photo-chemical photography will always exist somewhere in the world. The question is what is the market going to look like for it in 20 years? I know I'm buying a Pentax 645 and setting up a darkroom as soon as my personal budgets allow, but I have no idea what supplies for that hobby are going to cost in the decades to come. It might remain comfortably inexpensive to work with once you get an initial setup, or costs might skyrocket and I'll replace the film body with a 645zVI or whatever the second newest model they're producing at that time is.

And there will always be a profit to made as long as there are large format B&W zone system photographers, medium format photographers and 35mm film photographers. Color film might go away but I doubt that B&W will die. To many out there. It wont ever be in huge #s that there once was but enough for someone making film to find a market to buy their product. We see that the C41 process B&W film has gone away but more traditional emulsions like tri x and developers will be around I'm sure for some time to come.

I was just given a roll of this from my boss. He found it at flea market for $.99.